SIGMUND FREUD THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
(1899-1900)

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Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3303 Notes 06A1SIGMUND FREUD THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (1899-1900)Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon,1965.Chapter V: The Material and Sources of DreamsAfter considering various, not least scientific, theories of dreams in preceding chapters,Freud discusses here several of his own and other persons dreams. He concludes that thesource of a dream may be: (a) a recent and psychologically significant event which isdirectly represented in the dream; (b) several recent and significant events, which arecombined by the dream in a single whole; (c) one or more recent and significant events,which are represented in the dream-content by allusion to a contemporary but indifferentevent; (d) a subjectively significant experience (recollection, train of thought), which isconstantly represented in the dream by allusion to a recent but indifferent impression. Freud comes to argue that some of our most significant dreams stem from infantileexperiences. Ultimately, he is keen to stress, the most significant elements of dreams aretraceable in particular to childhood experiences, not least those of an Oedipal nature. Parents, he says,play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all persons whosubsequently become psychoneurotics. Falling in love with one parent andhating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic impulseswhich arise in early childhood, and are of such importance as the material ofthe subsequent neurosis. But I do not believe that psychoneurotics are tobe sharply distinguished in this respect from other persons who remainnormal – that is, I do not believe that they are capable of creatingsomething absolutely new and peculiar to themselves. It is far moreprobable – and this is confirmed by incidental observations of normalchildren – that in their amorous or hostile attitude toward their parents,psychoneurotics do no more than reveal to us, by magnification, somethingthat occurs less markedly and intensively in the minds of the majority ofchildren. ()Legends drawn from antiquity, he argues, confirm this impression: he has in mind thestory of Oedipus in particular. Here is his summary of the play, Oedipus Rex bySophocles:Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as asuckling, because an oracle had informed the father that his son, who wasstill unborn, would be his murderer. He is rescued, and grows up as a king'sson at a foreign court, until, being uncertain of his origin, he, too, consultsthe oracle, and is warned to avoid his native place, for he is destined tobecome the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. On theroad leading away from his supposed home he meets King Laius, and in asudden quarrel strikes him dead. He comes to Thebes, where he solves theriddle of the Sphinx, who is barring the way to the city, whereupon he iselected king by the grateful Thebans, and is rewarded with the hand ofJocasta. He reigns for many years in peace and honour, and begets twosons and two daughters upon his unknown mother, until at last a plaguebreaks out- which causes the Thebians to consult the oracle anew. HereSophocles' tragedy begins. The messengers bring the reply that the plaguewill stop as soon as the murderer of Laius is driven from the country. ButRichard L. W. Clarke LITS3303 Notes 06A2where is he? . . . The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure,approached step by step and artistically delayed (and comparable to thework of a psychoanalysis) that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, andthat he is the son of the murdered man and Jocasta. Shocked by theabominable crime which he has unwittingly committed, Oedipus blindshimself, and departs from his native city. The prophecy of the oracle hasbeen fulfilled. ()The play’s impact, Freud argues, has less to do with the “contrast between destiny andhuman will” (), the traditional view, than the way in which it reminds us of deeplyrepressed aspects of our own identity:His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because theoracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towardour mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward ourfathers; our dreams convince us that we were. King Oedipus, who slew hisfather Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than awish-fulfilment- the fulfilment of the wish of our childhood. But we, morefortunate than he, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, havesince our childhood succeeded in withdrawing our sexual impulses from ourmothers, and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from theperson for whom this primitive wish of our childhood has been fulfilled withall the force of the repression which these wishes have undergone in ourminds since childhood. As the poet brings the guilt of Oedipus to light by hisinvestigation, he forces us to become aware of our own inner selves, inwhich the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed. ()To further support his cause, Freud contends that there is even a moment in the playwhen Jocasta directly alludes to a dream, which many men dream, about sleeping withone’s mother.Freud then turns his attention to Shakespeare’s Hamlet which, he argues, is “rootedin the same soil as Oedipus Rex” (): thewhole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods ofcivilization, and the progress, during the course of time, of repression in theemotional life of humanity, is manifested in the differing treatment of thesame material. In Oedipus Rex the basic wish-phantasy of the child isbrought to light and realized as it is in dreams; in Hamlet it remainsrepressed, and we learn of its existence- as we discover the relevant facts ina neurosis- only through the inhibitory effects which proceed from it. In themore modern drama, the curious fact that it is possible to remain incomplete uncertainty as to the character of the hero has proved to be quiteconsistent with the over-powering effect of the tragedy. The play is basedupon Hamlet's hesitation in accomplishing the task of revenge assigned tohim; the text does not give the cause or the motive of this hesitation, norhave the manifold attempts at interpretation succeeded in doing so. According to the still prevailing conception, a conception for which Goethewas first responsible, Hamlet represents the type of man whose activeenergy is paralyzed by excessive intellectual activity: "Sicklied o'er with thepale cast of thought." According to another conception, the poet hasendeavoured to portray a morbid, irresolute character, on the verge ofneurasthenia. The plot of the drama, however, shows us that Hamlet is byRichard L. W. Clarke LITS3303 Notes 06A3no means intended to appear as a character wholly incapable of action. Ontwo separate occasions we see him assert himself: once in a sudden outburstof rage, when he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on the otheroccasion when he deliberately, and even craftily, with the completeunscrupulousness of a prince of the Renaissance, sends the two courtiers tothe death which was intended for himself. What is it, then, that inhibits himin accomplishing the task which his father's ghost has laid upon him? Herethe explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamletis able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away withhis father and has taken his father's place with his mother- the man whoshows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood. Theloathing which should have driven him to revenge is thus replaced by self-reproach, by conscientious scruples, which tell him that he himself is nobetter than the murderer whom he is required to punish. ()All he has done, Freud claims, is to “have here translated into consciousness what had toremain unconscious in the mind of the hero” (). Freud’s views in this regard weresubsequently developed famously by Ernest Jones in his own “Oedipus and Hamlet.” However, Freud warns, just as “all neurotic symptoms, like dreams themselves, arecapable of hyper-interpretation, and even require such hyper-interpretation before theybecome perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded frommore than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit ofmore than one interpretation. I have here attempted to interpret only the deepest stratumof impulses in the mind of the creative poet” ().Chapter VI: The Dream-WorkHere, Freud begins by stressing the differences between his own and previous approachesto dream interpretation:All other previous attempts to solve the problems of dreams have concernedthemselves directly with the manifest dream-content as it is retained in thememory. They have sought to obtain an interpretation of the dream fromthis content, or, if they dispensed with an interpretation, to base theirconclusions concerning the dream on the evidence provided by this content. We, however, are confronted by a different set of data; for us a new psychicmaterial interposes itself between the dream-content and the results of ourinvestigations: the latent dream-content, or dreamthoughts, which areobtained only by our method. We develop the solution of the dream fromthis latent content, and not from the manifest dreamcontent. We are thusconfronted with a new problem, an entirely novel task - that of examiningand tracing the relations between the latent dreamthoughts and themanifest dream-content, and the processes by which the latter has grownout of the former. ()Freud is at pains to emphasise the verbal, rather than pictorial, basis of dreams: thedream-content appears to us as a translation of the dream-thoughts intoanother mode of expression, whose symbols and laws of composition wemust learn by comparing the origin with the translation. The dream-thoughts we can understand without further trouble the moment we haveascertained them. The dream-content is, as it were, presented inhieroglyphics, whose symbols must be translated, one by one, into thelanguage of the dream-thoughts. It would of course, be incorrect to attemptRichard L. W. Clarke LITS3303 Notes 06A4to read these symbols in accordance with their values as pictures, instead ofin accordance with their meaning as symbols. For instance, I have beforeme a picture - puzzle (rebus) - a house, upon whose roof there is a boat;then a single letter; then a running figure, whose head has been omitted,and so on. As a critic I might be tempted to judge this composition and itselements to be nonsensical. A boat is out of place on the roof of a house,and a headless man cannot run; the man, too, is larger than the house, andif the whole thing is meant to represent a landscape the single letters haveno right in it, since they do not occur in nature. A correct judgment of thepicture-puzzle is possible only if I make no such objections to the whole andits parts, and if, on the contrary, I take the trouble to replace each image bya syllable or word which it may represent by virtue of some allusion orrelation. The words thus put together are no longer meaningless, but mightconstitute the most beautiful and pregnant aphorism. ()For Freud, the dream-analyst is evidently engaged in a process of textual interpretationakin to that of literary criticism.Freud then proceeds to identify the precise processes which comprise what heterms the ‘dream-work’ by which the true meaning of a dream is obfuscated. The first is‘condensation’ by which he means something like ‘compression’: thefirst thing that becomes clear to the investigator when he compares thedream-content with the dream-thoughts is that a tremendous work ofcondensation has been accomplished. The dream is meagre, paltry andlaconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dreamthoughts. The dream, when written down fills half a page; the analysis, which containsthe dream-thoughts, requires six, eight, twelve times as much space. Theratio varies with different dreams; but in my experience it is always of thesame order. As a rule, the extent of the compression which has beenaccomplished is under-estimated, owing to the fact that the dream-thoughtswhich have been brought to light are believed to be the whole of thematerial, whereas a continuation of the work of interpretation would revealstill further thoughts hidden in the dream. We have already found itnecessary to remark that one can never be really sure that one hasinterpreted a dream completely; even if the solution seems satisfying andflawless, it is always possible that yet another meaning has been manifestedby the same dream. Thus the degree of condensation is - strictly speaking -indeterminable. ()The question arises: how exactly is this process of condensation accomplished? Basically,through condensation, two or more key items at the latent level of the dream arecondensed into or fused with one another. Freud then proceeds to discuss some of hisown key dreams. Elsewhere, Freud uses the term ‘over-determination’ to refer to theprocess by which the presence of a single element in the dream-content is in fact afunction of several determinants in the dream-thoughts. Freud then turns to a discussion of the second key technique involved in the dream-work – ‘displacement’ – by which he means something like ‘transference.’ In a nutshell,he argues, “that which is obviously the essential content of the dream-thoughts need notbe represented at all in the dream. The dream is, as it were, centred elsewhere; itscontent is arranged about elements which do not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts” (). He continues: itnow becomes very probable that a psychic force expresses itself in thedream-work which, on the one hand, strips the elements of the high psychicRichard L. W. Clarke LITS3303 Notes 06A5value of their intensity and, on the other hand, by means of over-determination, creates new significant values from elements of slight value,which new values then make their way into the dream-content. Now if thisis the method of procedure, there has occurred in the process of dream-formation a transference and displacement of the psychic intensities of theindividual elements, from which results the textual difference between thedream-content and the thought-content. The process which we here assumeto be operative is actually the most essential part of the dream-work; it mayfitly be called dream-displacement. ()Freud concludes: “[d]ream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two craftsmento whom we may chiefly ascribe the structure of the dream” ().Freud finally turns his attention to what he terms the ‘means of representation’ indreams. Here, Freud is interested in grasping what techniques of association substitutedat the manifest level of the dream for the logical relations (e.g. of cause and effect oreither-or) which must inhere in the dream-thoughts that comprise the latent level of thedream if these are to be meaningful at all. He argues that the essential dream-thoughts commonly reveal themselves as a complex ofthoughts and memories of the most intricate possible construction, with allthe characteristics of the thought-processes known to us in waking life. Notinfrequently they are trains of thought which proceed from more than onecentre, but which are not without points of contact; and almost invariably wefind, along with a train of thought, its contradictory counterpart, connectedwith it by the association of contrast. The individual parts of thiscomplicated structure naturally stand in the most manifold logical relationsto one another. They constitute foreground and background, digressions,illustrations, conditions, lines of argument and objections. When the wholemass of these dream-thoughts is subjected to the pressure of the dream-work, during which the fragments are turned about, broken up andcompacted, somewhat like drifting ice, the question arises: What becomes ofthe logical ties which had hitherto provided the framework of the structure?What representation do ‘if,’ ‘because,’ ‘as though,’ ‘although,’ ‘either-or’ andall the other conjunctions, without which we cannot understand a phrase ora sentence, receive in our dreams? To begin with, we must answer that thedream has at its disposal no means of representing these logical relationsbetween the dream-thoughts. In most cases it disregards all theseconjunctions, and undertakes the elaboration only of the material content ofthe dream-thoughts. It is left to the interpretation of the dream to restorethe coherence which the dream-work has destroyed. ()In short, “logical relations between the dream-thoughts do not obtain any particularrepresentation in the dream” (). Freud finishes the chapter by examining the forms into which particular examples oflogical argumentation, not least ‘cause and effect’ or ‘either -or,’ are transposed in dreams. He contends that the presence of the former (a relationship of consequence) at the latentlevel is often represented by a succession of dreams, or parts thereof (i.e. what appears tobe a mere sequence) at the manifest level. Similarly, the presence in the dream-thoughtsof the latter in the form of alternatives which imply the necessity of choosing betweenthem is often represented by a mere juxtaposition of possibilities in the dream-contentwithout any sense that these are mutually exclusive. It is, Freud argues, the task of thedream-interpreter to restore the original logical relations that have been masked in thisand related ways through the intervention of the dream-work.

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SIGMUND FREUD THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (1899-1900)

After considering various, not least scientific, theories of dreams in preceding chapters, Freud discusses here several of his own and other persons' dreams. He concludes that the source of a dream may be: (a) a recent and psychologically significant event which is directly represented in the dream; (b) several recent and significant events, which are combined by the dream in a single whole; (c) one or more recent and significant events, which are represented in the dream-content by allusion to a contemporary but indifferent event; (d) a subjectively significant experience (recollection, train of thought) , which is constantly represented in the dream by allusion to a recent but indifferent impression.

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(1899-1900)

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